Tuesday, December 23, 2008

My Pilars of Creation and other fuel chit chat.

In 1746, Jean-Philippe Loys de Cheseauxan an astronomer from Lausanne, Switzerland presented a list of nebulae to the Academy of Sciences in France. This nebula is listed as one of his discoveries, later photographically documented by what to me is one of the most amazing mechanical creations of our time, the Hubble Telescope. This image known as the Pilars of Creation is apart of The Eagle Nebula, a young open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpen, also discovered by Cheseauxan. These clusters are about 7,000 light years away from earth. One of the reasons why this shit is so fascinating to me is because of the protostar. Ok, fine. A protostar is a large object that forms by contraction out of the gas of a giant molecular cloud in the interstellar medium. Oh my, I love this stuff so much. The gas emitting and creating this mass is mostly Molecular hydrogen. As we know, Hydrogen is a colorless, odorless, nonmetallic, tasteless, highly flammable, the lightest and most abundant of the chemical elements, constituting roughly 75% of the universe's elemental mass and is basically the molecular shit. Properly cooled and combined, Hydrogen has the potential to be one the greatest fuel sources on our planet. NASA uses hydrogen to launch the Space Shuttles. They're even working on a toy model car that runs on solar power, using a regenerative fuel cell to store energy in the form of hydrogen and oxygen gas. It can then convert the fuel back into water to release the solar energy. Incredible! Imagine if this were mass produced and allowed into our global market..the sky's the limit. No pun intended. Iceland has one the largest natural reserves of Hydrogen on our planet. What's stopping us from harnessing the power of Hydrogen to begin production of solar, hydrogen, oxygen and above all clean modes of transportation? I realize the question is rhetorical. Watching the 27 year old man from Utah yesterday bid his way into saving 22,000 acres of oil rich land with prison as a possible outcome, I started thinking about how long it's gonna take to see other forms of fuel begin to take precedence over the clearly decreasing fuel source of oil on the planet. What will it take to finally implement these technologies into a grossly flawed economic fuel formula? The tidal wave of this change would be staggering. I hope I'm live to see the day. In the meantime, I appreciate the 27 year old man from Utah for his ingenious yet theatrical attempt at preserving land. Thank god we haven't been able to fuck up the stars yet. B